Why do Republican Women LIE So Much?

Maybe it’s the Palin tour that’s tipping the scales –- the documented, fact-checked lies in her book and her whining rebuttals mount by the day -– but even so, the scope and nature of female Republican lies is so much more outrageous than that of their male Republican counterparts. It’s not only about Palin’s lying. It’s Liz Cheney, Michelle Bachmann, and the latest outrageous liar, Virginia Foxx:



Nothing gets my blood boiling faster than a lie about settled history (and this woman was an educator!). For the record, the Senate vote for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was 73-27, with 46 Democrats and 27 Republicans voting AYE. At the time of passage, President Lyndon Johnson said prophetically, “there goes the South.”

He was right. Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” was born, the racist Dixiecrats in the Democratic Party moved to the Republican Party, and what has become the modern realignment of the parties took root. As for those moderate Northern Republicans who voted with the Democrats: They were purged by the Republican Party’s lurch to the right, driven out by Southerners and evangelicals, culminating in Ronald Reagan’s election.

One interesting sidebar: Yesterday, Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, the only Northern Democrat to vote against the Civil Rights Act, made history as the U.S. capitol’s longest-serving lawmaker. Senator Byrd, who will turn 92 on Friday, regrets that vote and has since renounced his segregationist past.

And Virginia, about Jesse Helms … At the time of passage of the Civil Rights Act, Helms was broadcasting racist rants from the local TV station, somewhat like a small-time Glenn Beck. Once elected senator in 1972 until his retirement, Helms never renounced his racist views even after many of his Southern colleagues had softened theirs.

These Republican women –- Foxx, Palin, Cheney, Bachmann -- are pathological liars. They can’t tell the difference between fact or fiction, and they don’t care. What makes them lie with such … brazenness?

Surfing the net, I landed (where else?) on Oprah.com for an answer. Susan Shapiro Barash says in her book Little White Lies, Deep Dark Secrets that “women lie not only more cleverly [than men do] but more often because in our society women are held to such a standard, and a lot of times, they have something to cover up. My theory is they use it as a survival technique and do it because they have been very good at doing it for so long.”

I’ll say, and it’s not only metaphoric. When she belongs to a conservative-to-wingnut white male-centric culture/party that so casually and frequently, and in so many ways, tells her to “stay in [her] place,” the Republican woman’s need to lie as survival mechanism must kick into high gear so early in her repressed childhood that at some point she just loses her grasp on reality and what is and is not, true.

Barash concludes: “I just note the way that women live their lives in this country and what they need to do to feel they aren't disempowered.”

Well, Republican women certainly. The one thing feminism has given Democratic women is, precisely, a sense of empowerment. Offhand, I can’t think of any Democratic women who flaunt their sexuality (nothing wrong with that, mind you) as much as Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann. Umm … but it's a certain kind of sexuality: I can imagine Palin and Bachmann pole-dancing, but not much else.

Here's what I mean: